Thanks for posting this. I'd been trying to remember this short story's name for a while now, and seeing this image immediately put me in mind of the "basilisk"!
Peter Watts' science fiction novels Blindsight and Echopraxia include "vampires" that co-evolved with humans. The vampires' aversion to crosses is described as their brains "crashing" when visually processing right angles.
His is an interesting take on vampire lore in sci-fi. I remember they also have drugs to mitigate this condition, and allow them to live in cities: the anti-euclidean, or auntie-e.
I would guess something similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepDream or any other system that tries to invert a convolutional neural network by 'maximizing' the match.
> This picture is designed to give the viewer the simulated experience of having a stroke (particularly in the occipital lobe of the cerebral cortex, where visual perception occurs.) Everything looks hauntingly familiar but you just can't quite recognize anything
I mean, Coldcut, DJ Shadow and the like were making sample-fests in the early 90s. The word is, Shadow's sampler of choise MPC60 can hold only something like 12 or 16 samples at a time, so the magic was him making ‘Endtroducing’ out of that.
> The song is intended to sound to its Italian audience as if it is sung in English spoken with an American accent, vaguely reminiscent of Bob Dylan, but the lyrics are deliberately unintelligible gibberish with the exception of the words "all right". Celentano's intention with the song was not to create a humorous novelty song but to explore communication barriers.
Keep in mind though that strokes (and ministrokes) come in many forms. They can affect most brain functions and sometimes you won't even be aware of them.
I don't think that reddit thread is the original source. Someone in the thread links to a larger-sized image which appears to be from https://funnyjunk.com/Cognitohazard/pxMTMck/.
EDIT: here's an even earlier source, from over a week ago (note: thread contains other strange but mostly safe for work images) http://boards.4channel.org/x/thread/22512161/cursed-image-th.... 512x512 seems like a more likely size for the image to have been generated at, at least.
EDIT 2: here's yet an earlier source, from March 10: https://www.instagram.com/p/Bu2IkGylneb/. Someone in the Twitter thread mentioned this as being the original source.
With a front page that has daily "Omg facebook is sharing your data", "you'll never guess what uber did now", "<random shit tech company> S-1", "let's all play armchair detectives and speculate why the 737 crashed", "shitcoin is good/bad for <whatever>", etc posts, I wouldn't exactly put HN that much above crappy content aggregator..
There are ads. The "<who cares> is hiring" ads, and I wouldn't be surprised if some content here that goes straight to the top isn't paid for somehow.. There's a large audience here, and no transparency in how the site operates, so the incentive is high.
> [...] simulated experience of having a stroke (particularly in the occipital lobe of the cerebral cortex, where visual perception occurs.) [...]
That sounds pretty scientific. Does anybody have a (citable) reference or scientific publication where this was published? Would like to read more about it.
I wouldn't trust that title from reddit one bit unless there is a better resource making that claim.
The picture has an ear in it, so I guess someone merged two wildly different pictures in GANbreeder and the redditor just took it for some internet upvotes.
I've experienced this, not as a result of having a stroke, but as a result of severe dehydration and depleted potassium making parts of my brain shut down, or at least malfunction horribly. It is terrifying, and even looking at this picture makes me begin to feel the panic I felt during that episode. I could not identify anything, or figure out the connection between what I was touching and what I was seeing. Bath taps became cats, my hands were strange alien objects that kept intruding into my field of view, the ambulance was some kind of great bloody animal that I was about to be fed to. I screamed blue murder and wept while clinging to a towel rail, apparently, until the paramedics sedated me.
It's hard to quantify just how scary losing that connection to reality is.
I need to go have a cup of tea. Looking at that has really shaken me.
I've had this experience before enough times that it's no longer frightening but means I urgently need some Gatorade or I may start shaking and pouring sweat.
For me it's more like a moving shade that makes it impossible to see what's behind it rather than not being able to recognize it. Do you have some detail on what you think it's the brain shutting down rather than an effect on the eyes themselves?
Maybe it's the electrolytes. An electrolyte imbalance can lead to a situation that mimics the symptoms of a stroke.[0]
>For me it's more like a moving shade that makes it impossible to see what's behind it rather than not being able to recognize it.
Are you aware of the shade or does it behave like your blind spot? Because I've had a few instances in my life where it felt like my blind spot took up a much larger portion of my vision. I've also had the shaking then suddenly starting to profusely sweat that goes away when I eat something.
I've had this about three times in my life. The first time I thought I was having a stroke and went to bed, in the hopes it would go away. The next morning I was alright.
The second time happened at work and a co-worker brought me to the hospital. Turned out I was having a migraine attack with aura.
The third time happened at work again. I took an aspirin and took it easy for about an hour. My project manager asked me to go home, but that felt more troublesome to me than just sitting it out.
I assume we're talking about scintillating scotoma here - you have about a minute to find a safe place to stop until the "blind" zone grows enough. But yeah, this precludes the bearer from piloting mechanisms that can't come to a stop within a minute.
starts as a small spot right in the "centre of vision". then it grows until I can't see anything at all.
Then vision comes back and is replaced by a headache so bad, even the tiniest movement hurts like a knife cut.
Then I sleep between 4 and 12 hours. The day after I'm something like hung over and the day after that it's like nothing happened.
Luckily, I don't get it often any more :-) But it's hard to explain to other people when it happens.
the good thing about the aura is I get a warning what's about to come, usually it means I can get home before it breaks out.
I can only remember once when the headache broke out before I got home and I started sobbing like a baby on the bus. An old lady worriedly asked me if I needed help and I don't really remember how I got home.
The blind spot portion is what I've experienced, but none of the rest. No flickering or even noticeable expansion. I was a kid at the time and was playing an FPS. At one point I realized that I could see all 4 corners of the screen, but a certain sizeable area inside it was not visible without me moving my eyes. It provided for an interesting gaming session, but did go away rather quickly.
Are you constantly incredibly thirsty? Coffee isn't actually a net loss in water - as Zerofries suggested, something else is wrong, or you're drinking a lot of beer all the time(which I'd argue is probably also "something wrong").
One can dehydrated not in a sense of having not enough water, but in the sense of not having enough salts to hold the water in body. In this case, the water you drink just becomes urine very fast and doesn't quench thirst at all. Just taking a bit of bare salt is not a solution either, you have to get some kind of an oral rehydration solution (either a specialized one, an isotonic drink, or maybe eat some soup if your apetite is not impaired). More about this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_rehydration_therapy and here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_intoxication
Yeah, they make special salt packets you can use called Oral Rehydration Salts that have an osmolal ratio of electrolytes plus just enough glucose to cause your upper intestine to rapidly take the fluids in. If you are severely dehydrated drinking a liter of the stuff is enough to restore you to sanity within about half an hour. I usually carry one or two packets in my hiking/climbing first aid kit. Trioral is a really common brand.
Mountaineering is strenuous and all-day enough that you drink water all day, and hyponatremia is a serious concern from drinking straight water for some people, like me. So what I normally do is mix up some Nuun and drink that every few hours. If I get in a bad way and run completely out of water. then I will mix up a liter of ORS and down that. But that's an emergency kind of thing for me because one of the side-effects I've noticed is that ORS will make you thirsty sometimes.
In my case, it was about day seven or eight of no water, no food, just profound vomiting until there was nothing left to vomit - anything I did drink came straight back out.
As to it being brain rather than eyes - I had a seizure once I was in hospital (I’m not epileptic or anything of the sort), and I was unable to assemble any thoughts much beyond unbelievable thirst - although my eyes were also affected - blurred and double vision.
My K levels were about 1.5 - imminent death zone. Heart kept stopping and starting. Thank Cthulhu for Hartmann’s solution.
Because this had become a semi-regular occurrence, and apart from three occasions out of some forty episodes, I managed myself back to a functional state. Hospitalisation is an absolute pain in the ass, means no sleep, no rest, and even more time lost.
I also greatly lost faith in the medical establishment - they failed to diagnose me, and carried out an unnecessary surgery which made matters worse.
I spent years excluding things from my lifestyle and diet to figure out what was making me ill to no avail.
I finally left my business, as I was getting to the point that I was in a perpetual cycle of being ill and frantically catching up, which was immensely stressful over the last five years or so of my tenure there, and about six months later, the vomiting stopped. It’s now been years.
I never took chronic stress seriously - now I do. It nearly killed me.
Dude. You need to explain how you got into this situation of not drinking or eating for 7+ days. Right now we're all imagining you crossed the Saraha on foot or something equally reckless.
For me it turned out to be sudden blood pressure drops.
I'd see my vision fade to yellow from the outside in. At 12 I had every damned test done by an ophthalmologist, only to come up empty. Much later, I had blood drawn for a test and when I stood after the same thing happened, but worse, and from everyone else's pov I fainted (I could hear and think, but not see or move). That's when I realized the issue was sudden blood pressure drops.
Sometimes this was accompanied by sugar lows, sometimes not.
Mind you, I never saw anything like the picture we're discussing here.
Admittedly I find this reaction very interesting in comparison to my own. I find not recognizing things very normal (due to the way my brain functions) and so upon viewing the photo my brain took the equivalent of a step back, squinting a little, and then moving on with its day. It identified black portions as cat fur, then there was an animal head, piles of garbage, some jewelery, mostly due to texture and internal pattern matching of what portions of things generally look like and projecting them onto the page.
This is really interesting (and horrifying - I'm sorry you had to go through that).
I find it very curious how much these neural-net-driven visualizations map onto human neurological experiences - for example, deep dream resembling an acid trip. That makes me feel like, at least on a cursory level, that neural nets are a step in the right direction to meeting "human intelligence".
The weird thing is that the url they use (for the sake of future readers, cvspharmacy.com ) is a broken site that just gives an error message, and has done so for a long time if the Wayback Machine is to be believed. Yet it at one point linked to the real CVS site.
I get a lot of spam email from something @cvspharmacy, maybe the real CVS (which I didn't know about until now) forgot to renew the domain and it was hijacked by spammers. Just speculating of course.
Are you suggesting "dumbass idiot 𓅩" with a bio of "shut the fuck hi" is a completely serious account? It's fairly obvious that it's a tongue-in-cheek joke, the linked url doesn't even work.
However the joke is spot on, since that image is not far removed from the general mess at a typical CVS. You walk in for your meds and are bombarded with a special deal on soda, makeup, want a beach toy? how about some junk food? oh wait here's some more cheap cosmetics to go with your passport photo… By the time you get to the OTC drug section that has the tiny selection of the same meds in 5 different brandings/packagings, you're already overwhelmed. The whole store is a UX fail.
As a side note, I'm fit and not diabetic but making people who struggle with glucose control walk past all these snacks is just evil—or ar the very least highly insensitive. Profit first, damn the sick! :(
It surprises me sometimes how innocently naive people are. How people miss obvious jokes, parody and sarcasm online. I figured as more people use the internet, the less naive they'd be, but it seems like the opposite is happening. And the more obvious the joke, the more people seem to take it seriously.
On the mainstream Internet, you can't ever be sure. What you consider an obvious joke can actually be intended as 100% serious by the poster. Or it could be some small agency's "brilliant" plan at social media marketing targeting unsophisticated normies.
I'm not quite sure what they're trying to do there, but the link isn't real. It goes to cvspharmacy dot com, but the actual site is cvs dot com.
Incidentally, CVS Pharmacy isn't a shady internet thing, they're a longstanding US brick'n'mortar chain. I think this is supposed to be a joke, just a rather obtuse one.
hi, i'm melipone (OP). the cvspharmacy link was an obvious joke meant to parody people who plug links after something goes viral. i got it from my friend karl's page (@hammerfist3); it's in his bio, too. also, it's a dead link; how stupid are people lol.
How can one tell parody and real without knowing your background? It's just a random tweet to 99% of people who clicked here. Known as Poe's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
I suspect there's more neurodiversity in our image processing stacks than we realize, and we've never before been able to observe it because all of our prior input was actually from a relatively small part of the possible image sample space that the real world can generate.
I find this mildly amusing, but I do the surreal and bizarre for entertainment routinely anyhow. But for the same reasons that I seek out those sensations, I find myself having sympathy for those who rather than seeking them out for occasional changes of pace, can't get away from them as they are haunted every moment of the day and night. That would be much less fun, to put it exceedingly mildly.
Yes, same here. Mild amusement but no discomfort. Had a discussion about it in a Facebook comment thread, and asked on or two of my friends. From my _very_ small sample size the number of neutral vs uncomfortable people seems about equal.
I suspect the people who feel most uncomfortable are the most vocal. Would be interesting to do a poll.
Compared to most DeepDream images this one isn't unsettling at all to me. I guess if you have seen a lot generated images, they become more familiar and less unsettling.
I've got several "plastic bags". Some of them I can even identify as the crinkly colored type often used for wrapping present-type things. I can also give you something that is clearly a display board. I can't tell you what it's displaying beyond a generic "smudge", but it's clearly a display board, like for spoons or coins.
Still, I don't argue the core point. Words are flexible and I can probably jam some word onto pretty much image, but I won't deny this image is quite resistant to that.
186 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 168 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echopraxia_(novel)
https://rifters.com/blindsight/vampires.htm
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/bghyv5/t...
From the thread's title:
> This picture is designed to give the viewer the simulated experience of having a stroke (particularly in the occipital lobe of the cerebral cortex, where visual perception occurs.) Everything looks hauntingly familiar but you just can't quite recognize anything
My understanding is that it's entirely comprised of sampled clips. A triumph of sound engineering.
> The song is intended to sound to its Italian audience as if it is sung in English spoken with an American accent, vaguely reminiscent of Bob Dylan, but the lyrics are deliberately unintelligible gibberish with the exception of the words "all right". Celentano's intention with the song was not to create a humorous novelty song but to explore communication barriers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisencolinensinainciusol
And another: https://youtube.com/watch?v=yU2wkD-gbzI
It looks to me like a random deep dream pic.
EDIT: here's an even earlier source, from over a week ago (note: thread contains other strange but mostly safe for work images) http://boards.4channel.org/x/thread/22512161/cursed-image-th.... 512x512 seems like a more likely size for the image to have been generated at, at least.
EDIT 2: here's yet an earlier source, from March 10: https://www.instagram.com/p/Bu2IkGylneb/. Someone in the Twitter thread mentioned this as being the original source.
This guy[0] is in pretty good shape. Albeit likely drunk and "watch this!" stupid.
0) https://i.4cdn.org/x/1555284615304.webm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwAqHTFHpAY
instagram->4chan->crappy content aggregator->reddit->HN
That sounds pretty scientific. Does anybody have a (citable) reference or scientific publication where this was published? Would like to read more about it.
The picture has an ear in it, so I guess someone merged two wildly different pictures in GANbreeder and the redditor just took it for some internet upvotes.
It's hard to quantify just how scary losing that connection to reality is.
I need to go have a cup of tea. Looking at that has really shaken me.
For me it's more like a moving shade that makes it impossible to see what's behind it rather than not being able to recognize it. Do you have some detail on what you think it's the brain shutting down rather than an effect on the eyes themselves?
>For me it's more like a moving shade that makes it impossible to see what's behind it rather than not being able to recognize it.
Are you aware of the shade or does it behave like your blind spot? Because I've had a few instances in my life where it felt like my blind spot took up a much larger portion of my vision. I've also had the shaking then suddenly starting to profusely sweat that goes away when I eat something.
[0] https://atlasofscience.org/stroke-mimics-why-we-need-to-cons...
The second time happened at work and a co-worker brought me to the hospital. Turned out I was having a migraine attack with aura.
The third time happened at work again. I took an aspirin and took it easy for about an hour. My project manager asked me to go home, but that felt more troublesome to me than just sitting it out.
starts as a small spot right in the "centre of vision". then it grows until I can't see anything at all.
Then vision comes back and is replaced by a headache so bad, even the tiniest movement hurts like a knife cut.
Then I sleep between 4 and 12 hours. The day after I'm something like hung over and the day after that it's like nothing happened.
Luckily, I don't get it often any more :-) But it's hard to explain to other people when it happens.
the good thing about the aura is I get a warning what's about to come, usually it means I can get home before it breaks out.
I can only remember once when the headache broke out before I got home and I started sobbing like a baby on the bus. An old lady worriedly asked me if I needed help and I don't really remember how I got home.
I'm bad about drinking water
https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-h...
https://nationalpost.com/health/nutrition-fact-or-fallacy-do...
http://time.com/5192272/coffee-tea-dehydrating/
https://www.webmd.com/diet/qa/does-caffeine-have-a-dehydrati...
Mountaineering is strenuous and all-day enough that you drink water all day, and hyponatremia is a serious concern from drinking straight water for some people, like me. So what I normally do is mix up some Nuun and drink that every few hours. If I get in a bad way and run completely out of water. then I will mix up a liter of ORS and down that. But that's an emergency kind of thing for me because one of the side-effects I've noticed is that ORS will make you thirsty sometimes.
As to it being brain rather than eyes - I had a seizure once I was in hospital (I’m not epileptic or anything of the sort), and I was unable to assemble any thoughts much beyond unbelievable thirst - although my eyes were also affected - blurred and double vision.
My K levels were about 1.5 - imminent death zone. Heart kept stopping and starting. Thank Cthulhu for Hartmann’s solution.
I also greatly lost faith in the medical establishment - they failed to diagnose me, and carried out an unnecessary surgery which made matters worse.
I spent years excluding things from my lifestyle and diet to figure out what was making me ill to no avail.
I finally left my business, as I was getting to the point that I was in a perpetual cycle of being ill and frantically catching up, which was immensely stressful over the last five years or so of my tenure there, and about six months later, the vomiting stopped. It’s now been years.
I never took chronic stress seriously - now I do. It nearly killed me.
I'd see my vision fade to yellow from the outside in. At 12 I had every damned test done by an ophthalmologist, only to come up empty. Much later, I had blood drawn for a test and when I stood after the same thing happened, but worse, and from everyone else's pov I fainted (I could hear and think, but not see or move). That's when I realized the issue was sudden blood pressure drops.
Sometimes this was accompanied by sugar lows, sometimes not.
Mind you, I never saw anything like the picture we're discussing here.
I have had my episode of panic attack and just looking at that picture made me feel some of those bad feelings again. Really weird.
I find it very curious how much these neural-net-driven visualizations map onto human neurological experiences - for example, deep dream resembling an acid trip. That makes me feel like, at least on a cursory level, that neural nets are a step in the right direction to meeting "human intelligence".
Please don't support this type of virality and profiteering. It's disgusting.
Presumably I've just been whooshed.
As a side note, I'm fit and not diabetic but making people who struggle with glucose control walk past all these snacks is just evil—or ar the very least highly insensitive. Profit first, damn the sick! :(
Incidentally, CVS Pharmacy isn't a shady internet thing, they're a longstanding US brick'n'mortar chain. I think this is supposed to be a joke, just a rather obtuse one.
> how stupid are people lol.
My thoughts exactly.
To me it did nothing, although I also couldn't recognise any of the items in the picture.
Does anyone else have the same experience?
I find this mildly amusing, but I do the surreal and bizarre for entertainment routinely anyhow. But for the same reasons that I seek out those sensations, I find myself having sympathy for those who rather than seeking them out for occasional changes of pace, can't get away from them as they are haunted every moment of the day and night. That would be much less fun, to put it exceedingly mildly.
I suspect the people who feel most uncomfortable are the most vocal. Would be interesting to do a poll.
At first glance it's "oh easy I can easily spot something in there, like that... Oh... Uh?"
I guess its been crafted to tickle the pattern matching part of the brain, so it looks familiar, but not? Like the uncanny valley?
Frame it differently and people would be more likely to go “huh, that’s weird”
Still, I don't argue the core point. Words are flexible and I can probably jam some word onto pretty much image, but I won't deny this image is quite resistant to that.
And there's a cheese grater on the left